For Homer Yasui, life at the Tule Lake internment camp as a teenager in 1942 provided more good times than bad.

"I played a lot of baseball, went to a lot of camp dances," the 88-year-old Portland resident said. "For me it was great fun."

Yasui's memories differ from the experiences of many others who passed through the notorious camp about 30 miles south of the Oregon border. It is all of these stories -- the good, the bad and the ordinary -- that leaders of the National Park Service want to hear when they visit Portland and Hood River this week.

What remains of Tule Lake, located in the dusty, unincorporated area of Newell, Calif., will soon be restored and preserved, thanks to a $278,000 grant to the Tule Lake Committee.

"I lost my freedom but I didn't dwell on that a whole lot because I was in a camp surrounded by Japanese people. That was very interesting," said Yasui, who would go on to become a physician. "I was not a minority anymore."

Yasui, who grew up in Hood River, was among more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in the western United States who were forced to leave their homes and report to relocation centers after President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens; the remaining were prohibited by law from becoming citizens.

Anna Tamura, a landscape architect and planner with the National Park Service, will oversee the project's design phase. For Tamura, a Japanese American who grew up in Northeast Portland, the project is personal. "I have several relatives who were incarcerated in the camps," she said.

Tule Lake, she said, "illustrates how our government deals with civil injustice during wartime and that it can get as extreme as having a prison inside an incarceration camp."

View full sizeHomer Yasui, 88, was 17 when he entered Tule Lake, one of 10 Japanese internment camps.Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian

Tule Lake, one of 10 internment camps across the West, earned a reputation as the most notorious of the camps. In 1943, the government administered a questionnaire to all internees, which included two questions regarding loyalty. Those who answered no to the questions -- questions now widely considered poorly worded -- were deemed disloyal and transferred to Tule Lake.

"The whole place became a giant prison," said Mike Reynolds, superintendent of the park service site.

"It's travesty enough to take U.S. citizens without just cause," Reynolds said. "But then to deem them disloyal and send them to prison camps. Tule Lake had a massive impact."

Both Tamura and Reynolds will travel to Portland and Hood River, along with other members of the National Park Service, in an effort to collect public input in the project's planning phase. The parks service is conducting workshops in 15 cities, involving communities up and down the West Coast as part of an effort to create an educational program at Tule Lake that accurately reflects its history. They will be in Portland at the Nikkei Legacy Center on Monday and in Hood River at the Hood River Public Library on Tuesday.

"There's a Japanese phrase, 'okagesamade,' meaning 'I am what I am because of you,'" Tamura said. "We have more opportunity and freedom and justice today because of what they experienced."